Adhithyan Vaiyapuri's Spartan Superway Blog

This week we changed the direction of our project and narrowed our responsibilities down. Instead of building a motor from Sapphire Motor's designs, we are just going to buy a motor from a manufacturer and modify it to fit our specifications. David, our mentor, told us to look at hub motors for electric bikes. Because ebike motors are built for two supports, I've been researching ways to modify the motor to work off one support, because the motor will only be attached to the bogie on one end. I've come to the conclusion that replacing the inner shaft with something heavier will create a cantilever effect and work best. Also, there is the issue of the motor's housing. Right now a lot of the motors have a large spoke radius, and won't fit on our current bogie design. So, we may need to redesign the housing.

During this week I spent a lot of time researching motor theory and electromagnetism. We decided to build our own motor using designs David, our mentor from Sapphire Motors is letting us use. Despite this, I felt like further research was needed, because if we can't understand the drawing files David is providing, we won't be successful in building our motor.

This week we had our first set of lightning talks. To complete this task, my group and I came together and went over what we discussed with our mentor David, what we were able to research individually, and what we feel we still need to know to design and build a high power brushless DC motor. After presenting our lightning talk, the group came together again, and further discussed the specification this motor would require, what type of motor we would build. We eventually decided on an 8 inch diameter, brushless DC inrunner motor. We left the class that day with the goal of having a more concrete plan for the motor by the next class, as well as getting more research done.